Cosmic Captain: Chapter 9

It was clear I’d had no idea how exhausted I was, because I fell asleep on the cardboard-akin mattress with no blankets and no pillow while I was trying to spitball escape plans. When I woke up, the flickery overhead light I’d never turned off still shone dimly, so I didn’t know what time it was or how long I’d been asleep.

Did it matter what time it was in space? How did they keep track? So many questions about life in the great beyond burned in my throat, but I had no one to ask. With a dry swallow, I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked around.

Still on Lovath’s ship. It was better than the cage I’d lived in for who knows how long. On the edge of the bed near my feet was a small pile of clothes with a pair of sandal-like shoes on top. That meant Lovath had been in the room while I slept, but I found I didn’t care. The clothes I’d been wearing earlier were all in place and if Lovath had wanted to do anything to me he certainly wouldn’t have needed to wait until I was asleep.

Pulling on some underwear—thank fuck, I was worried aliens didn’t wear any—a new pair of sweatpants, and the sandals, I faced the door. And promptly found I didn’t know how to open it. Okay, I had to think logically. How had Lovath opened it to let me in? I remembered it slid to my left to get in, which meant it slid to my right to get out. Did that mean a control panel would be on my left?

I looked in that direction, and there was a little shelf the size of my palm jutting out next to the door. I waved my hand over it and the door slid right on open. Huh. Everything looked like it came right out of one of those old Earth sci-fi shows, and I wondered if it would be so very hard for me to adjust after all.

I itched with the urge to plug a computer into the mechanism, see how the code worked behind it. Honestly, it was crazy how much I missed my programming job. Poring over code to find the one extra space that had fucked the whole thing up had never been exciting, but I’d give almost anything to be doing that instead of re-learning how to open a door.

I’d stood in the doorway for long enough that it closed again, and I quickly swiped my hand back over the sensor to open it up. Taking a ginger step into the hall, I glanced around and saw nobody. I crept up the hall to the communal, as Lovath had called it. It was really more of a tiny mess hall but overall this didn’t seem to be that large of a ship.

That door to the flight deck was wide open today, and I hesitantly approached the chair where Talisaar sat. His long, dark green hair and deep purple skin weren’t some sort of hallucination unfortunately, and yesterday he’d been the one most vocal about shipping me to Torvan.

“Hi, uh…Talisaar?”

Talisaar spun in his chair, which was attached to the ground, diverting his attention from the multiple transparent screens displaying information all around him. His comically large, rounded eyes narrowed as much as they could when they focused on me.

“Human. Did you need something?”

I inched a step back from him. “Just…looking for Lovath.” It wasn’t like I had much else to do, and there were a million questions I wanted to ask him. Somehow I didn’t think Talisaar would be as forthcoming as the captain, plus Lovath had at least tried to make me comfortable so far.

“Down in the engine room.” He answered, gruff. When I didn’t immediately go anywhere, he jerked his head towards the kitchen-esque area. “There’s a ladder over there.”

Just lovely. My track record with ladders wasn’t amazing at the moment. Maybe resting had restored some of my strength, but I was about to find out regardless. Finding the hole, I climbed down, and thankfully my arms didn’t shake quite so much as they had the day before—or just a few hours ago? I didn’t know how long I’d slept.

The engine room was loud, and I emerged near what looked like a big ball of pulsing, blue energy barricaded by metal bars. If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably the ship’s power source. I certainly wasn’t planning to throw any magnets at it to see if it would blow us all up. It made a deafening, whomp sort of sound that came and went in waves.

A clink sounded from further in the room, and when I ventured deeper inside, the pulsing of the power source was replaced by the low hum and rattle of machines. I wondered at the metal grates below my feet, under which I saw mostly tubes and wires. Couldn’t one spilled drink doom us all?

I spotted Lovath leaning against the flat wall at the end of the room, studying a tablet that was plugged into a panel on the wall he was leaning on. When I approached, the leathery spots on his face that acted as brows were drawn tightly together in consternation.

He heard me coming, and relief crossed his face when he looked up at me. “Grayson, good to see you up. You were asleep for a few days, but Kryn said it was probably the stasis pod drugs wearing off.”

A few days? Was that why I was so thirsty? “Oh, I…didn’t know it was that long.”

“It was a little worrying.” Lovath’s expression grew tight, and neither of us addressed why. It was worrying because I was currently worth a lot of money. Not because he actually cared about my well being. “Is there anything you need?”

It was a diversion, but a good one. “Water, I think? But I don’t know if aliens drink the same water was humans.”

Lovath snorted at that. “You’re the alien here, you know. I don’t know anything about human biology, but Kryn knows a bit about exotics. He said you should be able to consume the same fluids and food as us.”

“Is Kryn…”

“Our medic.” With a weary sigh, Lovath set his tablet to the side. “I need a break from this anyway. Let’s go back up to the communal.”

“Having trouble with something?” I motioned to the discarded tablet. I wished I could say the wheels were spinning in my head as to how to escape, but really I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any danger on the ship. I couldn’t escape if we crashed and I was dead, so it was in my better interest to know.

Lovath waved a dismissive hand. “Drekking cargo bay door won’t open and close.” When I looked where he pointed, sure enough the wall in front of us had that same, wide outline that the flight deck had. If that led to the cargo bay I’d been kept in, it meant the only way to get there was from the ladder on the other end of the ship.

“Seems inconvenient.” I agreed.

“Well it’s some programming error and I’m shtec at the code so it will have to wait until we can stop somewhere and have it looked at. We can’t just stop anywhere either, unless we all want to get arrested.”

Programming error? I followed Lovath back up the ladder, but my mind was a million miles away. I was good at programming on Earth—fantastic really. There wasn’t a programming language out there I didn’t know and I’d spent probably a majority of my adult life looking at code.

Alien computer code wouldn’t be anything like that, surely. But…what if I could try? And if I knew how the techy shit worked here, I’d have a lot more control over my fate. I didn’t plan advertising it, but I was a really fucking good hacker on Earth too.

I crossed my shaky arms over my chest to try and hide that going up a ladder had exhausted me once again, but I had a feeling Lovath knew. He didn’t comment on it, just pulled open an upper cabinet in the kitchenette, grabbed a metal bottle, and handed it to me.

“Water.” He supplied, then traded the cabinet for a drawer and fished out a packaged bar of some kind. “This is called luuka. I don’t know if it’s like anything you have on Earth, but it’s safe for you to eat.”

I’d already glugged half the metal bottle of water without a second thought. Did they ration? I wasn’t sure of anything other than that I was far more parched than I had thought. When I unwrapped the luuka and took a bite, it crumbled in my mouth and did not help the dryness at all. It tasted rather bland, kind of like how bird seed smelled but also like a strange jerky.

“Thank you.” I was probably breaking some alien laws around hospitality and politeness by just shoving my face with food and water. Lovath looked nothing other than slightly amused, though. Forcing myself to swallow, I asked, “Can you tell me why you can’t take me back to Earth?”

It was the one question that had been bouncing around most prominently in my head since he mentioned not messing around with the Sol System. It seemed like it had been so easy for aliens to take me. In fact, humans apparently got abducted all the time. Why was it so hard to return me?

Lovath sighed and crossed the area to plop down on one of the welded in benches at the single table. “It’s complicated. Sol System is heavily monitored, it can’t even be entered without a permit. Krexxians can get in and out easier because they have permits to do medical studies.”

So they did study humans. Just some of them abused their privilege to traffic us instead. Some things never changed. “Why is it illegal to go to Earth in the first place?”

“Hostile planet. Humans fight everything. And it’s a Class 3 society. Law is no contact until you’re Class 2.” Lovath paused, then elaborated. “Class 2 means societies with advanced space travel.”

“Humans have space travel.” I snapped back, defensive of my home. Humans weren’t idiots; we advanced more and more as every year passed, and our methods for space travel just continued to improve.

Talisaar, who I’d forgot was only a few yards away in the open flight deck, barked a laugh. Swiveling to face us, he sneered, “Launching a tin can five paces from your doorstep isn’t advanced space travel, human.”

“I have a fucking name, fish guy. It’s Grayson, or is that too hard for you to say?”

Talisaar gave me a downright vile look, but before he could speak, Lovath cut him off to speak to me instead. “Back down, ksiva. Tal is just surly.” Lovath was clearly amused, and I did not want to ask him what ksiva meant. Was it too familiar of him to give me a nickname when I was nothing more than a slave he was delivering to a buyer?

Yes.

“Tal? Surly? No way.” Zenkara rounded the corner, tone mocking. “Go back to navigating, sweetie, it’s all you’re good at.” She bent to drop a kiss on his cheek, then forcibly swiveled his chair back to face all those screens and control boards.

At my confused look, Lovath explained, “Zen and Tal are married. Wedded bliss. Matrimony. Drekking like animals. All that nasty stuff.”

I went green and stopped eating the luuka bar. Did he really think I wanted to know all that? And wasn’t it supposed to not be cool for crew to fraternize with each other? Then I remembered I was on a ship full of alien smugglers who didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that stuff.

Desperate for a change of subject, I spat out, “I want to learn code.”